Closer

by artist Melanie Johnson

June 8 – Sept 14

Closing Reception:
9/13, 3-4:30 PM

(left) Melanie Johnson, Push (detail), 2013

Chesapeake Gallery

The Chesapeake Gallery at Harford Community College features contemporary art by emerging and established artists as well as HCC faculty and students.

Located in the Student Center, the Chesapeake Gallery is the only exhibition space of its kind between Baltimore and Newark. It serves as a vital educational link between the community and the practice of art and design in the region.

"Closer" by Melanie Johnson, June 8 - September 14, 2018

Melanie Johnson received her MFA in Painting from Indiana University. She is Associate Professor of Art & Design and co-coordinator of the Foundations Program at the University of Central Missouri and currently resides in Kansas City.

Johnson states, “I make large scale figurative drawings and paintings using imagery derived from observation and composite sources. Narrative is employed loosely in my work and I draw primarily on the familiar as a catalyst for making. The imagery gives form to a dissonant accrual of lived experience, family histories and anecdotes, appropriated iconography and the acting out of roles both obligatory and imagined. Surface, palimpsest and indexical histories of making are meaningful in my process. I want the physical work to encapsulate imagery representative of a lived moment as well as the history of its own manifestation. The work should conjure a habitat that has one foot in reality and the other in a state that evokes the slipperiness of memory, longing or a disquieting curiosity.”